“The visit was made. It was a formidable campaign; a night battle against pestilence and asphyxia. It was at the same time a voyage of discoveries. One of the survivors of this exploration, an intelligent working-man, then very young, still related, a few years ago, the curious details which Bruneseau thought it his duty to omit in his report to the prefect of police, as unworthy the administrative style. Disinfecting processes were very rudimentary at that period. Hardly had Bruneseau passed the first branchings of the subterranean network, when eight out of the twenty laborers refused to go farther. The operation was completed; the visit involved the cleaning; it was necessary, therefore, to clean, and at the same time to measure; to note the entrance of water, to count the gratings and the mouths, to detail the branchings, to indicate the currents at the points of separation, to examine the respective borders of the various basins, to fathom the little sewers ingrafted upon the principal sewer, to measure the height of each passage under the keystone, and the width, as well at the spring of the arch as at the level of the floor; finally, to determine the ordinates of the levellings at a right angle with each entrance of water, either from the floor of the sewer or from the surface of the street. They advanced with difficulty. It was not uncommon for the step-ladders to plunge into three feet of mire. The lanterns flickered in the miasms. From time to time, they brought out a sewer-man who had fainted; at certain places, a precipice. The soil had sunken, the pavement had crumbled, the sewer had changed into a blind well; they found no solid ground; one man suddenly disappeared; they had great difficulty in recovering him. By the advice of Fourcroy, they lighted from point to point, in the places sufficiently purified, great cages full of oakum and saturated with resin. The wall, in places, was covered with shapeless fungi, and one would have said with tumors; the stone itself seemed diseased in this irrespirable medium.
“They thought they recognized here and there, chiefly under the Palais de Justice, some cells of ancient dungeons built in the sewer itself. Hideous in pace. An iron collar hung in one of these cells. They walled them all up. Some odd things were found; among other things, the skeleton of an orang-outang which disappeared from the Jardin des Plantes in 1800—a disappearance probably connected with the famous and incontestable appearance of the devil in the Rue des Bernardins in the last year of the eighteenth century. The poor devil finally drowned himself in the sewer.
“Under the long, arched passage which terminates at the Arche Marion, a rag-picker’s basket, in perfect preservation, was the admiration of connoisseurs. Everywhere the mud, which the workmen had come to handle boldly, abounded in precious objects, gold and silver trinkets, precious stones, coins. A giant who should have filtered this cloaca would have had the riches of centuries in his sieve. At the point of separation of the two branches of the Rue du Temple and the Rue Ste. Avoye, they picked up a singular Huguenot medal in copper, bearing on one side a hog wearing a cardinal’s hat, and on the other a wolf with the tiara on his head.
EXTENT OF THE WORK.
“The complete visitation of the subterranean sewer system of Paris occupied seven years, from 1805 to 1812. While yet he was performing it, Bruneseau laid out, directed, and brought to an end some considerable works. At the same time, he disinfected and purified the whole network. After the second year, Bruneseau was assisted by his son-in-law Nargaud.
“Tortuous, fissured, unpaved, crackling, interrupted by quagmires, broken by fantastic elbows, rising and falling out of all rule, fetid, savage, wild, submerged, in obscurity, with scars on its pavements and gashes on its walls, appalling,—such was, seen retrospectively, the ancient sewer of Paris. Ramifications in every direction, crossings of trenches, branchings, goose-tracks, stars as if in mines, cœcums, cul-de-sacs, arches covered with saltpetre, infectious cesspools, an herpetic ooze upon the walls, drops falling from the ceiling, darkness,—nothing equalled the horror of this old voiding crypt, the digestive apparatus of Babylon, cavern, grave, gulf pierced with streets, Titanic molehill, in which the mind seems to see prowling through the shadow, that enormous blind mole, the past.
“At present the sewer is neat, cold, straight, correct. It almost realizes the ideal of what is understood in England by the word ‘respectable.’ It is comely and sober; drawn by the line; we might almost say, fresh from the bandbox. At the first glance, we should readily take it for one of those underground passages formerly so common and so useful for the flight of monarchs and princes, in that good old time ‘when the people loved their kings.’ The present sewer is a beautiful sewer; the pure style reigns in it; the classic rectilinear alexandrine, which, driven from poetry, appears to have taken refuge in architecture, seems mingled with every stone of that long, darkling, and whitish arch; each discharging mouth is an arcade. If the geometric line is in place anywhere, it surely is in the stercorary trenches of a great city. There all should be subordinated to the shortest road. The sewer has now assumed a certain official aspect. The very police reports, of which it is sometimes the object, are no longer wanting in respect for it. The words which characterize it in the administrative language are elevated and dignified. Villon would no longer recognize his old dwelling in case of need.
HOW THE SEWERS ARE BUILT.
“The excavation of the sewers of Paris has been a difficult work. Paris is built upon a deposit singularly rebellious to human control. There are liquid clays, living springs, hard rocks, those soft and deep mires which technical science calls Moutardes. The pick advances laboriously into these calcareous strata alternating with seams of very fine clay and laminar schistose beds, incrusted with oyster shells contemporary with the pre-adamite oceans. Sometimes a brook suddenly throws down an arch which has been commenced, and inundates the laborers; or a slide of marl loosens, and rushes down with the fury of a cataract, crushing the largest of the sustaining timbers like glass. Quite recently at Villette, when it was necessary, without interrupting navigation and without emptying the canal, to lead the collecting sewer under the St. Martin Canal, a fissure opened in the bed of the canal; the water suddenly rose in the works under ground beyond all the power of the pumps: they were obliged to seek the fissure, which was in the neck of the great basin, by means of a diver, and it was not without difficulty that it was stopped. Elsewhere, near the Seine, and even at some distance from the river, as, for instance, at Belleville, Grande Rue, and the Lunière arcade, we find quicksands in which we sink, and a man may be buried out of sight. Add asphyxia from the miasma, burial by the earth falling in, sudden settlings of the bottom, and the work of constructing sewers can well be understood to be dangerous.”